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Bronswerk Heat Transfer BV uses FloEFD.Pro to develop air-cooled coolers and innovative fans with the potential to make an enormous impact in industries requiring a "greener" solution

July 2007

Bronswerk Heat Transfer BV (www.bronswerk.nl) uses FloEFD.Pro, an easy-to-use general purpose engineering fluid dynamics software from Flomerics Ltd. to develop new air-cooled coolers and innovative fans with the potential to make an enormous impact in industries requiring a "greener" solution. While traditionally such apparatus has a thermodynamic efficiency of up to 60%, their new designs based on the new fan achieve up to 80% efficiency. The potential energy savings worldwide can be staggering as their product can save 15% of the electricity it uses. These savings could result in 20% savings in generation capacity in Holland alone over the course of 10 years. "Engineering Fluid Dynamics (EFD), the foundation for FloEFD.Pro, is more practical than Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)" said Guus Bertels, senior Engineer. "EFD is a natural extension of CFD that is more intuitive for mechanical engineers. The information generated with FloEFD.Pro especially for the taxing complexity of cooler aerodynamics is far beyond data obtainable through physical measurement and experimentation."

Since its inception in 1940, Bronswerk has become a leading designer and manufacturer of heat exchangers, compressors and fans. Bronswerk's air-cooled coolers are used as process coolers in the oil and gas as well as chemical industries. They have become the supplier of choice for companies such as Shell, Exxon Mobil, Bayer, Philips, Unocal and Texaco. Their fans range from 2 to 10 meters in diameter and cool heat exchangers which are also extremely large – often as big as a building. While designing a new generation of these industrial cooler systems and fans, the engineering team at Bronswerk faced a difficult challenge: to develop a new cooler and fan and make them as quiet as possible to meet stringent environmental standards. To further complicate the matter, the new fan design needed to cope with a wide range of environmental (wind gusts and building interference), fluids and pressure conditions.

The engineering team at Bronswerk used a combination of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire from PTC and FloEFD.Pro from Flomerics. Since FloEFD.Pro is fully embedded inside Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire, the combination of the two engineering tools enables Bronswerk to use a single design platform for geometrical design as well as mechanical and aerodynamic analysis without changing their design process.

"Using FloEFD.Pro, we were able to make hundreds of variations in the geometry to fine-tune the fan and heat exchanger performance and reduce costs without sacrificing quality" explained Bertels. After fine-tuning their design, Bronswerk has finally created a new design that is a giant leap forward and years ahead of their competition. "Our challenge was to develop the quietest cooler system. The added efficiency was an additional and unexpected huge benefit. Sometimes when you want to improve something you can't just improve it a little bit. You need a large improvement to breakthrough into uncharted territories." With over 30 years of experience in the field of flow analysis, Bertels adds that "we would not have been able to solve this challenge without FloEFD.Pro."

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